Never Enough Hours in a Day
As I’m writing this, I’ve just finished my first draft of over 1.2k lines of code that I’ve written in the past 3 days for a presentation I’m delivering this upcoming Tuesday. I’m exhausted. I’ve uploaded the code to a remote server that I’m using for compilation and rendering because the workload is too heavy for my own personal system to handle, and so I’m blogging in-between debugging and rendering.
I can’t believe this spring break is almost over already. The days seemed to bleed into each other. Perhaps I’ve lost track of time because of the ungodly amount of programming I’ve been doing these past few days, and not exactly the kind of programming that I find leisurely at that. It hasn’t seemed like much of a break for me, and so I guess that brings me to the thought in my mind that led to the title of this post: there are just never enough hours in a day.
No matter how much passion and drive and motivation you may have, we are forever prisoners of the arrow of time always moving forward. We cannot slow the passage of time, nor can we stop it, nor can we reverse it. I look back at and contemplate the past a lot. In fact, I admit that I’m guilty of perhaps even living in the past at times. While my brain is here, while my fingers are typing and while I’m coming up with algorithms and writing lines of code to express them on the fly, my soul is somewhere else.
If I could add more hours to a day, then I would. I look back at the past and wish it had been longer. I look back at the days I spent carefree and reckless in my youthful teenage years and I wish they could have lasted forever, I wish those days could have had an infinite number of hours within their finite timespan.
My days have been monotonous lately, both because of my own personal workload and also because of the depression of having lost Lambda Tau five weeks and one day ago. I haven’t found much pleasure in my hobbies anymore. I can’t recall the last time I went out for a leisurely skate through the park. I wake up, put in 110% into my academics, put in 110% into my work, and then put in 110% to everything else in my life that needs it. It’s not that I don’t want to allocate some more leisure time such that I can just unwind and relax without any expectation of productivity or work, but rather, that I can’t find that time. There’s little variety to the potpourri of the day. There’s nothing to look forward to at the end of the week… not anymore, at least.
I used to have insomnia, but now I have the opposite. By the end of the day, when my head hits the bed, when the sheets cover and protect me from the darkly creeps, my eyes go blank and my brain shuts off. I’m so utterly exhausted that the rest I so desperately crave comes instantaneously.
It sounds a lot like I’m burning out, but I’m not. I assure you that I’m not. I could handle twice the workload, and I just wish I had twice the time in a day. I just wish I could live in these moments for longer instead of reaching the end of them abruptly as the grains of time get swept away by the wind. I’m not burning out, but I admit that I’ve been depressed lately. What an untruth it would be if I were to say that it were not related to Lambda Tau! The pain of which is still so fresh, still so tender like a hot knife in my heart, that I still actively avoid certain words, places, and things that remind me of her.
The National Cyber League Spring 2021 Season Individual Game starts tomorrow morning. I hope I can finish this presentation and these workshop materials by then. That’s where I’m currently at in life right now.
Happy hacking!